2020: the year of the technological revolution

BMetcash chair Robert Murray says we'll be telling our grandchildren about this year of rapid technological change.

We are living in the middle of what our grandkids will learn was the technological revolution. The way that boards operate is changing year on year and technology is changing the businesses that we operate in, creating capacity for disruptive forces in industries.

Combined with the economic environment and an Australian regulatory environment that is out-of-date and archaic, at a time when quite possibly global supply chains are going to have to reconfigure themselves, then we’ve got a hell of a cocktail of disruptive change going forward.

We’re going to need the very best thinkers around board tables — enabled by a set of rules that free them up instead of constraining them — to just navigate companies through this period.

It’s going to be a very, very challenging time. The next five to 10 years will be as difficult a period to be a director than

I think there has ever been.

Robert Murray is the chair of Metcash and a director of Southern Cross Austereo. He was formerly a director of Linfox and Dick Smith, and a CEO of Nestlé and Lion. Murray was interviewed for the Korn Ferry The Chair of the Future: Towards 2025 report.